


"I was never her."

by lightsaberlesbian



Series: Humans Fanwork Challenge 2017 [2]
Category: Humans (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 14:03:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14978714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightsaberlesbian/pseuds/lightsaberlesbian
Summary: It’s ironic, how if it hadn’t been for Beatrice Elster – the wife, the mother, the daughter – Karen Voss might have been allowed to become one herself.





	"I was never her."

**Author's Note:**

> Canon Week  
> Day 2: Introspection   
> Write a piece that centres on a certain character and the way they perceive themselves, limiting references to other characters as much as you can. Get in their head!

**_A wife_ **

She is not a wife, she isn’t married. She’s not a fiancée either, or even a girlfriend. She doesn’t know if she wants to be or how it ever could be possible. How could something immortal that doesn’t age have a working long-term relationship with someone that gets older with every passing day, when the immortality has to be kept a secret? Even if she could, every loved one she’d have would always be approaching a certain death with each second and she knows she can’t bear always losing people over and over and over again. So she drowns herself in work, let it absorb her, consume all of her time so that there is no time for anything but the files on her desk and the people in the cubicles around her. They go out sometimes, as a team. She chats and she laughs and she jokes, she even lets some of the men compliment her. But never anything more than that, not once.

 

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue – it used to be a time-honored tradition thought to bring luck to the bride on her wedding day. Now it might as well be a description of her – of what she is. She is something new based on something old, her appearance borrowed from someone else, someone who isn’t her, and blue as in the feeling. Blue as her blood.

**_A mother_ **

She is not a mother. She is not a mother because she does not have children, and she will never be a mother because she can’t. Adoption isn’t an option, you’d need a husband for that. And who would want to bring a child into this world, anyway, when there are so many things wrong in it? There is so much pain, so much suffering, injustices, poverty, inequality. Loneliness. She could never raise a child in this time with a good conscience, not even for her own company.

 

She considers getting a pet. A dog, a black Labrador like the service dogs at the station. But animals die too and loss is her greatest fear. She has had her fair share of loss in life already, she is lonely as it is. If she loses anything else she fears the loneliness will manifest itself like a black hole, sucking her and everything around her in to a great nothing. She knows she wouldn’t survive that.

 

**_A daughter_ **

No, she’s not a daughter either. She doesn’t have a mother or a father and she is not an orphan, because the parents that are missing were never there to begin with. She wasn’t created by a fusion of gametes in an act of love, with genetic information mixing, cells dividing over and over again to build her. No one carried her in the womb for nine months, awaiting her arrival in excitement. No one gave birth to her, no one bled or suffered for her to see the light of day. No one raised her, she was abandoned.

 

She was built by the hands of one man, formed from plastics and metals, painted with color, sewn with the finest of fibers. Her body contains no cells and she will never grow or age. No one knew of her except her one creator and when the others found out, they rejected her at once. She will never forget how the young boy screamed, how two girls and two other boys stepped in front of him, like a wall surrounding a castle, protecting him from her.

 

**_Beatrice Elster_ **

Her blood boils at the mere thought of the name. It’s the name of a mad woman, a basket case, a nut job, a lunatic who couldn’t keep her shit together to the point that the only way she could remain in control of herself for a few moments was to take her own life. Disgusting.

 

It’s ironic, how if it hadn’t been for Beatrice Elster – the wife, the mother, the daughter – Karen Voss might have been allowed to become one herself.


End file.
